By chance in earliesh 2019, I bought a book called "Slavery and Social Death" by Orlando Patterson. As I later found out, it may be the finest synoptic study of slavery there is. What fascinated me were the pages and pages of meticulously documented tables showing where slavery has existed......the African tables were especially eye-open…
By chance in earliesh 2019, I bought a book called "Slavery and Social Death" by Orlando Patterson. As I later found out, it may be the finest synoptic study of slavery there is. What fascinated me were the pages and pages of meticulously documented tables showing where slavery has existed......the African tables were especially eye-opening.
In August of 2019, I opened the NYTimes and started reading the lead essay of something called the "1619 Project" with anticipation. But a few sentences in, I started to sense something wrong. Mellifluously written, that lead essay, for which Hannah-Jones would win the Pulitzer for commentary (not history), described a ship coming into an American port. The passage seemed insular and the ship itself reminded me of the ship in Wagner's "Flying Dutchman". And yes, I got suspicious.
A bit further down in the same essay was a sentence about who first got the franchise when the US was established. As I remember from high school history, it was land owning white males. But Hannah-Jones wrote the sentence in a way to erase the fact that non-land owning white males could not vote. It was as if she could not attribute "victimhood" to white men as it would sully her intersectional antipodes. At that point, in my mind, I sensed we were in Pravda land.
The critique of "1619" was vast and, to me, finer than the "1619 Project" itself. The "right-wing" backlash was critically minor. The main repository became the extraordinary commentary and interviews carried out by the Worldwide Socialist Website, which clearly understood that identity was burying class:
By chance in earliesh 2019, I bought a book called "Slavery and Social Death" by Orlando Patterson. As I later found out, it may be the finest synoptic study of slavery there is. What fascinated me were the pages and pages of meticulously documented tables showing where slavery has existed......the African tables were especially eye-opening.
In August of 2019, I opened the NYTimes and started reading the lead essay of something called the "1619 Project" with anticipation. But a few sentences in, I started to sense something wrong. Mellifluously written, that lead essay, for which Hannah-Jones would win the Pulitzer for commentary (not history), described a ship coming into an American port. The passage seemed insular and the ship itself reminded me of the ship in Wagner's "Flying Dutchman". And yes, I got suspicious.
A bit further down in the same essay was a sentence about who first got the franchise when the US was established. As I remember from high school history, it was land owning white males. But Hannah-Jones wrote the sentence in a way to erase the fact that non-land owning white males could not vote. It was as if she could not attribute "victimhood" to white men as it would sully her intersectional antipodes. At that point, in my mind, I sensed we were in Pravda land.
The critique of "1619" was vast and, to me, finer than the "1619 Project" itself. The "right-wing" backlash was critically minor. The main repository became the extraordinary commentary and interviews carried out by the Worldwide Socialist Website, which clearly understood that identity was burying class:
https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619
There were also, to choose a couple, great critiques such as these:
https://www.opera-historica.com/artkey/oph-202101-0005_the-1619-project-and-living-in-truth.php
https://catalyst-journal.com/2021/12/what-the-1619-project-got-wrong
And also, the cataloguing of its editorial mischief and lying:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248
Thanks for the links. Extra credit for use of the word synoptic!
Yeah, WSWS did great work in its critique.